For the past couple of years, I have been working on a novella called Sin’s Requiem. I call it a thematic follow up to Trading Saints for Sinners…something that exists in the same world, but the stories do not intersect at all. But though thematically similar, they are different in tone. They’re more like two sides of the same coin.Continue reading →

I started teaching in 2010, I was 25 and totally knew what I was getting into. By that I mean, I have no idea what I was getting into. Oh, I took classes on teaching and whatnot, but August 2010, I found myself on the other side of the classroom for the first time. I was not Roman anymore. I was Professor Colombo. And I was overwhelmed.

But I learned as I went, and I got pretty good at this. Students review me well, the departments I work for like me (until I start crusading. I do that sometimes) like me, I’m asked to take on more responsibilities, such as serving on committees and advising students…sometimes I’m even paid for this extra work! And I found a style of teaching that works for me. That’s a post for another time—we have this term called “pedagogy,” as if teaching styles were easy to define, but in reality, every teacher has their own pedagogy. Oh…maybe I don’t need a post. Yeah, that’s basically it. Okay, I’ll post about my pedagogy one day. I’m sure everyone would be interested in that. Continue reading →

Just by the title, I already know that people are going to cry murder. It’s easy to pick on the Hobbit trilogy, turning one relatively short book into an 8 hour epic. And diagrams of how many million per page of the book or minutes per word have been done…and they are all, to put it simply, useless arguments.

Please stop. As someone with the actual namesake of the explorer, Colombo, I understand the desire to praise this ancestral figure as something of a hero. After all, I would much rather have a last name shared with a great explorer and discoverer, and not with a mass murderer.

Which is exactly what Christopher Columbus….Colombo…is. A mass murderer. He conquered, enslaved and wiped out entire populations of people. And still, many states celebrate him as if he brought peace to the Middle East (or got lost and brought peace to the wrong place a few centuries ahead of time). But this isn’t a letter to state governments or the US American people. It’s to my own. Because this really needs to stop.

Now, as it turns out, many cities have recognized the atrocity of celebrating this dickweed. And I say dickweed, because like a weed, his dickery spread fast and killed almost everything. Anyway, Seattle, for instance, is celebrating the indigenous people of their city instead of the guy who killed a bunch of them. Halfway through the article, I ran into this:

“Italian-Americans are deeply offended,” Lisa Marchese, a lawyer affiliated with the Order Sons of Italy in America, told The Seattle Times.”By this resolution, you say to all Italian-Americans that the city of Seattle no longer deems your heritage or your community worthy of recognition.”

Seriously? Is that really the argument you want to make? And what, are the indigenous people of Seattle not worthy of recognition? Or how about the fact that there’s still, signed by the president every year, an entire month to celebrate Italian culture and heritage? A month! And besides that, there are other Italians who are much more worthy of praise. How about Serpico? The Italian-American who exposed corruption in the NYPD and put his life on the line (literally) for justice? And he’s just one guy. There are so many other better people to recognize, and we should be. The time of falsifying Columbus as a hero needs to end.

He killed millions.

He discovered nothing

He wasn’t even the first foreign visitor to America

Oh, yeah, he killed millions.

And we really have no right to that day. Other explorers deserve it a lot more than he does. And while no explorers are without flaws, almost all of them are better than Columbus.

Columbus should be the figure of our past that we try to ignore and hope people will forget about. Because, and I say this without hyperbole, to celebrate Christopher Colombo is the same as celebrating Adolf Hitler. Except that Colombo killed more people.

Getting published is a pretty awesome thing. Having people buy your book and want it signed–all the better. I am still very happy to have a book out, so I’m going to give away 5 books via Goodreads. Head over and enter!

GoodReads

The story is exciting, and Andrews writes the characters well. Pei is a fun little character, certainly, but I'm not a big fan of his art. Too muddy.
And while it was fun to read--especially the latter half, it still felt padded. A visi...

I liked reading about Auri, and the novella is strange enough to work. Plus, the revelations about her character I look forward to seeing play out in the Kingkiller narrative. But it also took me much longer to read than it should have, ...